


Mountains

by rustywrites



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alpha Timeline, Angst, Gen, M/M, Stridercest - Freeform, stupid prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-27
Updated: 2012-08-27
Packaged: 2017-11-13 00:01:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/497137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rustywrites/pseuds/rustywrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are times when you feel like you really knew him, as if all those old newspaper clippings and magazine articles and videos of interviews have somehow congealed in your memory to form a physical person.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mountains

_I dreamed of a lonely voice that night  
Quiet as death  
Outside my window  
It sang a sad and lovely tune  
Clear as a bell  
Soft as a shiver  
It said, I want you all the time_

_\- Radical Face ‘Mountains’._

\----------

 

There are times when you feel like you really knew him, as if all those old newspaper clippings and magazine articles and videos of interviews have somehow congealed in your memory to form a physical person. You remember things that never happened, getting woken up by gentle jabs to the shoulder, the sound of rapidly paced phone conversations echoing through the wall of an apartment that's not stranded in the middle of the sea, shared jokes and shared laughs and shared knowing silences. 

It's like reaching for a familiar piece of furniture in the dark, expecting your hand to hit the edge of a table or a chair only to wave and stumble into empty air, five inches further back than you'd originally estimated. That sudden, earth shattering uncertainty slides in and overstays its welcome. You're left struck in place, thoughts record-scratched and breath caught, (“Strider, say, you alright?” “What? I'm fine. Sorry, English. What was I saying? Oh right -”). 

You're left off balance. 

Those nights, you find yourself staring at the ceiling and listening to the waves outside as they break against the pylons that support your apartment. They sound like heartbeats, almost, when you don't pay much attention, and the wind sounds like breathing sometimes, when it presses against your windows in just the right away. Sometimes you pretend you can hear Jake breathing like that, too, or Jane, or Roxy. Sometimes you pretend you can hear their hearts beating against the walls that make up their chests, but you never can. Their microphones aren't sensitive enough to pick up the subtle nuances of their pulses; their fingers aren't delicate enough to punch out the rhythm of their bodies in written words. 

Too far, too far. 

And so, whether you like it or not (and you do, you don't, you do), you're left with him and that empty space in the room of your memories where you misjudged the distance between your hand and and something solid. 

You've never believed in ghosts and so you wrap yourself up in a blanket made of metaphors and moments that never happened; listening to your room breathe while cobbling together a Frankenstein's monster of sound bytes and paparazzi photographs until you're left sweating and short of breath with your hand between your legs and you lip bleeding from salt-water cracks. You conjure words that fit together like jigsaw pieces behind your eyelids; tell yourself anecdotes in a voice that doesn't belong to you, like that time your brother took you to the set of his movies, forced you to dress nice but not to smile because smiling is still, will always be, decidedly uncool. Like that time he told you that though you technically don't have a birthday, fuck it, we're going to celebrate it now, and we're going to celebrate it right. Like that time you stumbled into his arms, bleeding from sword-cut that would need to be stitched up in the bathroom later but you don't mind because sometimes lessons that hurt the most are the most important. 

Like that time when you were never alone. 

It never dawns on you until after the fact how decidedly lacking in eroticism your fantasies have become until much after the fact, when you're laying, listening for the heartbeat of the waves but only hearing your own in your eardrums, sweat slicked and aching, tangled. Only after, you do uncoil from yourself and breathe deep, blotting your eyes with the back of your hand and pretending that the salt water there is just dripping from the sore line of your brows. Only after, do you slink away into the shower to rub your body raw as if scrubbing hard enough will wash away all those lies you let yourself live in, if only for a second. 

Later, you'll push the old magazines back under your bed like something to be ashamed of (and maybe you are), you'll sit back down at your computer and you'll re-connect, plugging nerve endings back into the appropriate outlets in your brain until the keystrokes come easier than thinking. 

As you type, you'll think about the nature of time and relative distance and the physics of it all because there's something grounding in the contemplation of the impossible made real. You'll keep both of your feet on the ground and both of your hands on the keys and your eyes focused forward. 

Outside, the ocean will have long since stopped breathing.


End file.
